prayer bomb
After infiltrating a Buddhist sangha for a year, the classes I took on New Thought with my dad, the perfunctory flirt with paganism as a teen, etc... I've come away with an observation that by no means parades around as a rule, but is confined to my own limited empirical sample: the people belonging to these movements are fucked up. Not in that they're cajoled into donating their sanity as alms to their religious/spiritual community, but in that they're looking for the right yard tool to hedge back the capricious landscape of their problems. Obviously something isn't just missing from their lives, there's not just an empty bed there when searching for the confluence of their existence with some amount of meaning, hearing only the faint sighs of mere emptiness - no, there's a goddamn wound there, a festering hole that no amount of gunpowder is going to cauterize. And they're tired of living from one incogitant blunder to another trying to ignore it, tripping haplessly into the arms of the nearest temple as a salve.
Knowing this, and knowing the amount of time, effort, and patience required in mending any hidden injury, and especially knowing how little resolve our race exhibits with these kinds of trials: don't fucking try to get me to do business with you using the false reassurance that you're a 'Buddhist' within the first minute of our dialog. Just don't. Knowing what I do, it's the exact opposite of reassuring.
Knowing this, and knowing the amount of time, effort, and patience required in mending any hidden injury, and especially knowing how little resolve our race exhibits with these kinds of trials: don't fucking try to get me to do business with you using the false reassurance that you're a 'Buddhist' within the first minute of our dialog. Just don't. Knowing what I do, it's the exact opposite of reassuring.